The Saga of Vagrant Holiday

A few years back I was scoping out stuff on YouTube and some random video popped up by a user called Vagrant Holiday.

His channel: (YouTube | Bitchute )

The "Vagrant" is a young guy, and his videos are like an FPS video game.  He wanders around Europe with his camera in hand, and in a kind of deadpan tone comments on what he sees.  He is cynical, sarcastic, and swears like a sailor.  What really was unusual is that he slept, as the title would suggest, like a vagrant, finding a place to stash his gear during his peripatetic day, then returning at night to sleep under bushes in parks, in abandoned buildings, or in wooded urban areas.  In one video his gear is stolen and he sleeps in a university building bathroom (Salamanca) or under the stairs in a hotel (Porto).

Part of his charm was his cavalier attitude towards trespassing and vagrancy, just no fear.  He hops fences and manages to scale cathedrals under renovation, a cloud-shrouded castle in Heidelberg, wherever.  He walks through abandoned train yards.  He eats free breakfast in hotel buffets.  He definitely has some decent hobo survival skills.

In his final video, he reports being robbed in Mexico.  Many said it was inevitable given his methods, but I don't think one needs to travel the way he did to have that happen.  Getting robbed is just a fact of life in Central America and Mexico.  In 5 months there my truck was broken into twice.  His one fuck-up I saw was fooling around with drug dealers in Lisbon, pretending his baking soda was coke.  Later, approached by yet another dealer, instead of just saying "go away" he engages with the guy and tries to secretly film him.  I've been to Lisbon, those guys are generally harmless, but you don't try to film them.  Just ignore them.

I've been an addict on and off for years.  I've scored in cities and countries worldwide and never had trouble.  You don't film dealers.  Or else you get sucker punched.

In another video he train hops and for a long time is out in the desert and gets dangerously low on water.  Definitely under-prepared. But he does make it out alive and avoids being caught, so he has that going for him.

So I found out about this at the end of 2023. 

It all came to end this year where he posted a rather scathing update on his bio:

I'm done with videos. No more will be posted here. Vagrant Holiday was a side project done purely for fun and not profit. http://www.bitchute.com/vagrantholiday

No need to read further if you're sane.

Do not try to find or contact me for any reason. I owe nothing to anyone. I'm not your friend. I have no idea who you are. If you claim I've saved your life, no I didn't. You don't need to know what I'm doing. It's not your business. If someone not posting to the internet on a regular basis is upsetting or the most mysterious thing you've experienced, I can't help you with your problem.

Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

There's nowhere else I'll be posting to. Rumors surrounding this channel are likely made up by attention seekers. If it sounds dumb, it probably is. If it doesn't, you might be the one who's dumb.

Go outside.

P.S. To those asking if I'm dead, the answer is yes. Funeral was last week. You weren't invited.

So I guess I'm not sane! A lot of people were angered by this. Especially these guys at Hardpoint. These guys were onto VH about 2 months before he quit. They got hold of video from the Seattle riots and there is a guy in a scene which VH had filmed, and there he is, all in black, wearing the backpack VH carries in his videos.  They seem to think he does owe people something, that he did change lives, and that they might have pushed him to post the renunciation above.

I figure it's his right. A lot of people were trying to figure out who he is.  And he basically shows himself breaking the law. In one video, Forbidden Island, he kayaks over to an island which is a maximum security prison for sex offenders and wanders through an abandoned prison.

Another video, Riot Holiday, ended up being used to identify a man who took a rifle from a burnt out cop car during the 2020 Seattle riots (DOJ PDF). That man, from this article, was convicted and sentenced to 16 months in prison. That would make me nervous. My guess is that getting robbed in Mexico, having his video used to put a man in prison, and the possibility of getting doxxed after having filmed himself trespassing and train-hopping might have contributed to his departure and the harsh "goodbye".

His videos are really well done. They probably took a while to produce. Maybe he just got bored with it. I'm thinking he was starting to get spooked by the dots being connected, that he was found in another video, the DOJ had used his film. If anyone could, the DOJ could probably find him, if they wanted.

Vagrant is almost certainly also a guy known as Surveillance Camera Man (Bitchute). Same snarky comments, same FPS-style camera work.  Both from Seattle.  In this video (9:50), Vagrant explains why he always wears black.  In this SCM video he films a man who at 19:50 goes on about how SCM is dressed all in black.  From the FP glimpses we see in both users' videos, there are similar clothes and builds.  The concepts are different, but the style of the video is essentially the same

This is especially true of this "lost footage" video Vagrant took at the Seattle CHAZ.  About three minutes in he starts filming people, not backing down when they confront him.  He just films and says nothing.  It's exactly like SCM footage.

Another potential piece of evidence is a video he posted as Elevator Man.  Similar content, although not always FP.  The guy is all in black, too.  There's no question Elevator Man is Vagrant, because in his third video (54:20) he posts an excerpt from the Elevator Man video. 

Elevator Man. Surveillance Camera Man.  Could be a coincidence. But with the build, the clothes, the style of video, the voice and the snark they are surely the same guy.  And if Elevator Man is SCM, then VH is also the same man 

  

So, that is what we know about Vagrant Holiday.  I hesitated to publish this, because I did't want him to be unmasked, but nothing here isn't already online.  I may have brought it all together, but it was just a matter of a few Google searches.

I admire the guy.  He's wily, smart, funny, and maybe not always wise, but pretty courageous.  He reminds me of some of the things I got up to as a young feller.  I didn't want to invade his privacy as he's clear he wants people to leave him alone. And for good reason. He's broke a host of petty laws and maybe even bigger ones when he toured Forbidden Island and hopped several trains.  One video helped put a guy in prison.  All good reasons to keep a low profile.

So, people might rightly say I'm not respecting that. Well, all of this information is already online, a lot of it together. I may have assembled a fuller picture but it's far from complete.  It's just my mania for being a completist and organizing my thoughts in public.

I'd document my own vagabond experiences, but to be honest, I wouldn't want people like me writing about it. If you truly want to be left alone, don't leave a permanent record accessible by hundreds of thousands of people. And certainly don't whinge about it. People can't resist solving a mystery. Dressing and acting like a ninja and making enjoyable art in a mask invites people to look underneath.

If you really want to be left alone, don't publish videos on multiple platforms, eh?

 

I just came across this article from a Seattle weekly which I'm sure is about Vagrant: Is the Creepy Cameraman Hanging out on Capitol Hill?

Yesterday evening, around 5:20pm, my friends and I were accosted by this guy aggressively recording us at the bus stop on Madison between 13th and 12th. When asked to stop politely, he would simply step closer. Attempting to dissuade him from continuing we moved, trying to keep him at our backs; he responded by remaining silent and moving around to try and get our faces on camera, getting really up close and aggressive. While one of us contacted SPD, my friend snapped a picture, attached. Finally, still silent, he decided to leave, putting away the camera and walking up Madison, turning on 13th.

Reading this, I wonder if VH is entitled to his privacy. This behavior is unsettling and upsetting to people. VH/SCM had no qualms about putting that online.

So, I figure if you're willing to freak people out by getting in their faces, filming them, and posting it online, a bit of turnabout is fair play.

Sorry Vagrant.

How long before they notice?

Title of an article about the doomed OceanGate vessel:

Videos of 'Titan Submersible Implosion' and 'Screams' Flood Social Media

Really?

The Ballot or the Bullet?

It's time now for you and me to become more politically mature and realize what the ballot is for; what we're supposed to get when we cast a ballot; and that if we don't cast a ballot, it's going to end up in a situation where we're going to have to cast a bullet. It's either a ballot or a bullet.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz ("Malcolm X" at the time), The Ballot or the Bullet, April 3, 1964, Cory Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio. (Boldface added)

I began this months ago and never really finished it, but it's still relevant, so I publish it now, with some additions.  It's somewhat wonky, but not all that bad....

In the past few years a few of my ostensibly pacifist, liberal American friends have purchased firearms, specifically because of the increasing presence of firearms at right-leaning protest marches and rallies.  They figure if the right wing is going to be heavily armed, they themselves should be prepared to defend themselves.  Some of these friends are LBGTQ, some are merely Democrats.  But they admit that the Trump years left them scared.  I only recently learned of groups like the Socialist Rifle Association (SRA) and Redneck Revolt, leftist groups advocating training with firearms.  This trend does not bode well.

SLA Banner

If the hard (and even the not-so-hard) right and left are arming themselves, not for hunting or sport but for political fears, one wonders how long it will be until the shooting starts.  I've read of course about groups in the 60's and 70's like the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Weather Underground (left wing).  And I've lived through the rise of the 90's militia movement, and more recently the birth of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys (right wing). 

In the 90's, right-wing rage was fueled by two standoffs during which excessive force by the ATF resulted in a large number of  civilian casualties.  The first was against the Weavers at Ruby Ridge (1992) and the second against the Branch Davidians at Waco (1993).  A rage that is perfectly justified.  At Ruby Ridge, ATF agents killed, among others, a 14-year-old kid, Sammy Weaver, and a woman, Vicki Weaver, while she held her baby in her arms.  At Waco, aggressive tactics led to a fire which resulted in the deaths of 76 people, including 25 children.  I remember the outrage I felt.  

The Waco incident begat even more violence; on the second anniversary of the tragedy, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.  At least 168 were killed and over 680 were injured.  McVeigh didn't trust the ballot, so he chose the bullet.

These militias didn't get as motivated by the MOVE bombing (1985), in which an incendiary device dropped from a helicopter by the Philadelphia PD caused a fire that left 6 adults and 5 children dead, but hey, the victims weren't white.  And if that seems too "woke" an interpretation, I say horse-hockey.  McVeigh, the militias, the Proud Boys, and perhaps to a lesser degree the Oath Keepers, all adhere to varying degrees of a white nationalist ideology.

I'm not saying that all the people killed in these standoffs were peaceful innocents, but the police responses were an almost guaranteed recipe for catastrophe.  At the MOVE bombing, for example, 500 police officers were mobilized and fired over 10,000 rounds at the MOVE compound in the exchanges of gunfire that preceded the bombing.  The Weavers and the Davidians were also heavily-armed.  But there are ways to deal with these kinds of situations that need not result in firefights and loss of human life, it's just that American law enforcement doesn't yet seem to have mastered the art of de-escalation.  We are a violent society.  Always have been.  The American public is armed to the teeth, and our police look more and more like GI Joe than Officer Friendly.

Neither "side" of the left/right spectrum can claim innocence when it comes to political violence:  the Weather Underground, SLA, and Panthers were not just waving guns around for street theater.  I know my history.  The right-wing militias talk a lot of talk, but those leftist groups of the 60's were no shirkers when it came to planting bombs, robbing banks, and many other acts of violence.  

It has seemed that in recent years a 60's-style storm is brewing.  The internet has intensified existing political divisions, as Google algorithms lead people to websites that correspond to previous searches and essentially serve as a tool for confirmation bias.  People are increasingly living within separate "infospheres" and it's making political discourse increasingly difficult to meet in the middle.  

The protestors/mob/insurrectionists/patriots (take your pick) of January 6th sincerely believed that the 2020 election was stolen, as that is what their President and choice of media were telling them.  Fox pundits still say the election was stolen, CNN calls that narrative "the big lie."  I was aghast at what I saw that day, but if ordinarily decent people genuinely believed an illegitimate election pushed Biden into office, it's understandable they'd want to do something about it.  People had lost faith in the ballot, and they resorted to the bullet.  

I don't want to start a political shouting match.  This post is not about who's right and who's wrong, just some observations about the increasingly different "reality tunnels" into which we're being led, and how people are increasingly choosing to arm themselves because of it.  It's a tunnel through which a dead-end road runs.   

I remain hopeful, but it's hard not to be pessimistic about it all.  It's hard to debate an opinion when the very facts are in question.  We have an ex-President who for years has uttered easily-refuted lies on a daily basis, yet people still believe him.  The "lamestream" media, the "enemy of the people," are not considered trustworthy.  Healthy skepticism is not a bad thing, but when the truth becomes lost among a daily deluge of "alternative facts" -- Orwellian Newspeak for "demonstrable falsehoods" (aka "lies") -- we've gone beyond healthy skepticism into the realm of paranoia and a reactionary complicity with the dishonorable manipulations of self-serving con-artists.  If half of the American population no longer trusts the ballot, how long will it be before they again decide to cast the bullet?

And what happens when a good chunk of one half decide they need to arm themselves against a good chunk of the other?

If "civil war" does come, it won't be fought by armies, but will essentially be terrorist acts, street-fighting, murder, and assassination.  I don't think we've reached the point of no return, but despite a seeming lull in domestic political violence, I fear more of the same on the horizon.  I'm sure people felt the same in the 60's.  Maybe it will pass, and our "anni di piombo" are behind us.  I lived in Italy in the late 70's, and recall having to learn about what mail not to open, not to linger too long in front of the windows, to be alert for strange cars in the neighborhood.  I recall vividly General Dozier's kidnapping.  It wasn't 24/7 fear and paranoia, but it was a fact of our lives.  I just hope that it won't become like that in America's most certainly "interesting times" to come.  If we make it through 2024 without a repeat of 2020, maybe I can stop holding my breath.  My face doesn't look so good in blue.

Be safe people, and read the news with all the critical might you can muster.  Am I being overly alarmist?  I hesitated to use the term "civil war" earlier, but "civil conflict" or "political violence" didn't seem to fit for a future scenario because as I see it, we're already living it.  I believe a lot of our current problems boil down to unresolved political issues between the Federalist/Anti-Federalist factions during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and which was part of the rhetoric used in Congressional debates in the years just before the Civil War.  The very name of the Tea Party movement evoked the Revolution, but what we seem to be witnessing today is a younger, more radicalized phase arising out of that discontent, which, though angry, remained mostly peaceful despite the sometimes violent rhetoric ("2nd Amendment solutions," for example).  I was always alarmed by that kind of talk, a kind of sewing of seeds which today are bearing such bitter fruit.

For some reason all this makes me think of that skit on SNL where Tom Hanks plays a Trump supporter on "Black Jeopardy" who discovers he has more in common with his black competitors than moneyed whites.  Left, right, black, white.  Perhaps our emphasis on these divisions obscure the fact that what we're really dealing with is an ongoing class struggle.  And though I understand the temptation of the bullet, I'm still willing to try to push ahead with the ballot.  But for it to work we need to start by rejecting lies and make an honest attempt to agree upon the truth, or at least the facts.  Maybe I'm just naive, but I'd rather not just yet resort to buying an AR-15.

 

America's Half-Blood Prince of Darkness

It doesn't take a particularly astute media observer to point out that Barack Obama has generated some extreme responses from the American public.  It's tempting to say Americans either love him or hate him, but the former option seems to be dwindling....you'd be hard-pressed these days to find people who still say they "love" him.  On the contrary, there's no shortage of hatred out there.

The kind of rhetoric in which we've been most interested here on LoS uses the language of religion.  In the giddy days following his election we began to hear of supporters speaking as if Obama were the Savior.  The Messiah in the form of a skinny lawyer from Chicago.  While this was partly conservative satire of liberal response to his election, there were grounds for the criticism.  For example, a 2008 cover story about Obama's popularity in the German magazine Der Spiegel was entitled Der Messias Faktor (The Messiah Factor).  Newsweek's January, 2013 cover on Obama's reelection was entitled The Second Coming. 

Perhaps even more widespread, however, has been the notion that Obama is a false Messiah, the Beast, the Antichrist.  Searching for "Obama is the Messiah" or "Obama is the Antichrist" in Google images will confirm that I'm not simply making this up.

It occurs to me that both identifications serve to arouse the ire of religious conservatives; on the one had there are the people who genuinely believe that Obama is the harbinger of the End Times.  On the other hand there are those who are offended that the media would make a comparison between Jesus and any secular figure, let alone one with whom they disagree politically.  And then there are those who doubt his nationality and religious allegiances or feel a vague if not explicit uneasiness about what a mixed race President means for the future of the country; it becomes easier to understand why intimations of saintliness provoke--at a minimum--a hostile response.  In an atmosphere as polarized as America today, where concession becomes a kind of treason, the rhetoric will become even more uncompromising; Obama not only isn't saintly, he's downright demonic.  This is also why people will overlook their doubts about a baffling health care plan full of flaws and unanswered questions and proclaim their unreserved support for something so obviously "good" and why others would prefer to shut the government down than accept something which is so obviously "evil".

In this context, which is not a historical abstraction but a reality of the here and now, the image above will generate a certain Internet buzz or at the very least a ripple of murmurs.

Drudge asks:  are those a devil's horns or the wings of an angel?  Are we are seeing Obama portrayed as a modern-day Hermes?  For some a welcome messenger and guide, for others a presumptuous conductor of souls trying to assume the role reserved for He of whom Obama is but a pale pretender?

Should we take note of the olive branch of peace or the sheaf of arrows?  13 leaves or 13 arrowheads.  Forget the symbolism of of the original 13 colonies, we all know what the number really means, right?  War and peace, black and white, give and take.  Not much of this last dynamic happening on the tiled floors of Congress.

This photo was shot by AFP photographer Saul Loeb as Obama spoke about hurricane preparedness in the context of the budget debate and, as the captions says, on the 7th day of the government shutdown.  Not so effective as an "Obama as God" portrait; to be accurate Obama would have to be resting....

But the wings or horns? photo gets at the heart of the social polarity in America today, which is not only being played out physically in Washington D.C., but in the mind of the country, where the war is being fought with symbols.  And if this is happening in the halls of Congress and in the American Mind, it would, at least for millions of Americans, indicate a spiritual war as well.  We can see the shadows on the wall engaged in furious struggle; it stands to reason there's something important going on outside the cave.

Somewhere out there, Jesus and Satan are locked hand in hand over the chessboard, tiled black and white, no give, no take.

 Angel or Demon?  Antichrist or Messiah?  Choose your own adventure!

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For further reading, here's a list of some other posts where we looked at odd photos of Obama, along with a few additional remarks in light of what I've mulled over today.  In some cases, I linked to online reactions to them and in others I've only now sought it out.  For the rest I don't know how people reacted....

Barack Obama: Hogwart's Alumnus 08/15/12

In this odd picture, an academically-robed Obama is shot in such a way that he appears to be holding a glowing ball of light while giving a speech about health care.  I think the photo was intentionally imitating a crystal ball, symbolizing that nobody knows exactly what the future would bring with regards to Obamacare.  At the time, the photo elicited mostly bemused reactions, but there were some half-serious comments out there to the effect that the liberal media were suggesting that Obama is some kind of magician.  Which of course has the additional capacity to offend as a celebration of the occult.

"Barack Obama is the Antichrist!" 03/23/12

In another health care-related image, the Huffington Post placed a photo of Obama holding his hands in the air, hand in hand with his colleagues, next to one of a Byzantine mosaic of Jesus in a similar pose.  The image was used to illustrate an article about Notre Dame (the university) suing the Obama administration because his plan mandated that birth control be covered.  Is HuffPo taking a swipe at Notre Dame, comparing Obama and Jesus as two men who would advocate taking care of the poor?  Or does is symbolize a face-off between secular and religious belief?  I didn't read any comments on this photo, but I can only imagine that for many people there would be nothing innocuous about its rhetorical or symbolic intentions.

The Royal Obamas: personally blessed by Christ the Redeemer 03/21/11

In this shot the Obama family is seen from below, Rio's Christ the Redeemer glowing in the background.  This photo generated significant online commentary by many who saw it as crude propaganda that associates the Obama family with holiness;  the nimbus of white light, the protecting arms of Christ looming in the background, the angle of the shot which is as if the viewer gazes up at the family....

An intellectual regarded disparagingly, as being impractical, officious, pedantic, etc. 08/04/10

In this shot Obama has a weird haughty look to him, his up-tilted head framed in such a way at to form a kind of circle within a black triangle  I didn't see any comments about this one, but I wondered then if Drudge used it to a) suggest the Eye of Providence to recall the Illuminati, a kind of guilt-by-association tactic or b) suggest a black KKK hood, evoking the reverse racism the man is accused of harboring not so deeply within.  (A quick search of the image does reveal that in a few instances people associated with the NWO, the Eye in the Pyramid or a pyramid with detached capstone.)

Political Saviors 03/18/10

This is a series of shots where both Democrats and Republicans are framed so that they appear to have halos or appear at the center of the cross.  I think these are certainly intentional and probably satirical comments on how politicians frame their political discourse in moral terms.  This set does not include Obama.

Obama as Jesus, or Hippocrates? 03/17/10

This was also a controversial shot, which generated a firestorm, or a least a fire-shower, of online comments.  Obama appears to have both halo and nimbus and a white cross hovers in the background.  Like the Rio pic, it is shot from below so we are looking up at him on high.  In this case, the cross was not part of the shot but was photoshopped into the image.  Conservative commentators saw an example of liberal bias, the deification of Obama.  This shot was used to illustrate an article about health care, which is why, according to some, a cross was an appropriate backdrop.

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I first saw this current AFP photo with the question about "wings or horns" on Drudge at about 12 PM in France on 8 October but by 3 PM it was no longer there.  Fortunate The Blaze includes a brief quip about Drudge's editorial choice, including a screen shot.  Quick work!  The Blaze wrote about it yesterday, so the image was apparently online for a while.  Odd is that Drudge called it a "shock" image, and asked the "horns or wings?" question, but he wasn't linking to an article; he linked to Yahoo news which merely carried the photo and named the photographer, date and event.  Apparently, Drudge is unaware of the long history of religiously-charged photos of Obama, or merely looking for another small way, like I think he did with the "eye in the triangle" photo, to feed anti-Obama resentment.  Which is his right, of course.  He's hardly secretive about his political orientation nor subtle with the articles he chooses and the titles he gives his links.

Makes me think of another photo someone sent me and which I put onto my website long ago, not too long after 9-11.  I don't recall where it came from, and I've never seen it elsewhere, except where someone has either hotlinked it or downloaded it and uploaded to their own site.  I guess we can add the horned President genre to world leaders giving dubious "Masonic" handshakes or flashing the famous "sign of the horns" collections so plentiful on the Web.  Just for kicks I did a Google images search on the following image it has been reproduced by quite a few sites around the world.  You can see that all its current online uses ultimately derive from that single source, because they all have the telltale signs of having been scanned from newsprint.  That means a proper digital original hasn't been made public.  So it's kind of cool that I let this thing out into the world years ago and it's still alive.  It'd be interesting to know who took it first and how it spread after that.  But viral standards these days, it's still pretty limited, but I still have that tattered bit of newsprint somewhere.

So, here it is, SHOCK photo of George W. Bush.  Definitely horns.

An unhappy list

Hoffman

The following list of US mass shootings comes from a post entitled The massacre of the children of America by Michael Hoffman.  I have to add that I don't agree with this editorial post, in which Hoffman condemns things such as usury, abortion and homosexual marriage and which one must presume are believed by Hoffman to be part of the cause of this massacre.  That said, it's a concise list of the "major" mass shootings in America since 1966; there is a stark power in seeing it laid out so dry:  date, place, number of casualties.  The tempo definitely seems to be increasing....

I'd like to see some data on mass-shootings prior to 1966.

Timeline of U.S. Massacres

Compiled by Michael Hoffman 

Compiler's note: All of the deaths listed are homicides, except in the case of a casualty statistic compiled by the media that groups a perpetrator who allegedly committed suicide, with the victims. Almost all of the deaths are by gunfire. I do not claim that this list is exhaustive. In almost all cases I have only listed as a "massacre" multiple deaths that occurred within a 24 hour period.

1966: Fifteen people are shot to death on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.

1966: In Chicago, Illinois, nine nurses are massacred.

1982: Eight workers are shot by a co-worker at a Florida machine shop.

1984: Twenty-one patrons of a McDonald's restaurant are killed in California.

1986: Fourteen postal employees are killed by a co-worker in Oklahoma.

1990: Nine people are killed at a GMAC loan office in Florida by a co-worker.

1991: In Michigan five people are killed.

1991: 23 people are killed in Luby's Cafeteria in Texas.

1993: 8 people killed in the San Francisco, California financial district.

1993: Six people killed on a Long Island, New York commuter train.

1997: Three students killed by a fellow student at a high school in Kentucky

1998: Five people killed (four girls and a teacher) at an Arkansas Middle School (the killers were two children, age 13 and 10).

1999: Coumbine High School, Colorado: 13 people killed by two students.

1999: Nine people killed in the financial district in Atlanta, Georgia

1999: Seven people killed at a church in Texas.

2000: Seven people killed Dec. 26 at an Internet company in Massachusetts.

2001: 2 students killed and 13 wounded by fellow student in California

2003: Five killed at a Mississippi aircraft plant by a co-worker.

2005: Five students and two others killed by another student in Minnesota.

2006: Five Amish children killed at their Pennsylvania school by a truck driver.

2007: Five killed at a shopping mall in Utah. An off-duty policeman exchanges gunfire with the perpetrator, preventing more killings.

2007: 32 students killed at Virginia Tech by a fellow student.

2007: Dec. 5 - eight people killed at a Nebraska shopping mall.

2008: Five people killed at Northern Illinois University.

2009: Ten people killed in Alabama.

2009: Thirteen people killed in a Binghamton, New York immigration center.

2010: In Manchester, Connecticut a co-worker kills eight people.

2011: Six people killed in Tucson, Arizona; among the eleven who are wounded, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is shot in the head but survives.

2011: Eight people killed at a beauty salon in California.

2012: A former student kills seven students at Oikos University in California.

2012: 12 people killed at a "Batman" movie in Aurora, Colorado.

2012: Six people killed at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin.

2012: Five people killed in Minnesota by a co-worker.

2012: Three people killed at a beauty salon in Wisconsin.

2012: Dec. 11 - two people killed at an Oregon shopping mall.

2012: Dec. 14 - 27 people killed at a Connecticut grammar school, including twenty children.

Death by Misadventure

David Carradine, Grasshopper, Kaine, Bill. Poor guy's family is going through one of the most humiliating public deaths in recent memory and quite frankly, we're hooked. The almost daily revelations which at first seem to clear up and then only cloud the issues at hand seem almost calculated to lure us into this increasingly weird tale.

Facts are precious commodities in any case, but in this one so far they don't seem none too reliable. Of course there is already talk of a cover up when we may simply be dealing with incompetence or merely even misunderstanding stemming from the different ways the Thai police respond publicly to cases. Leaks are not unique to Thailand and maybe they too aren't in the habit of disclosing accurate information and details about their investigations. Maybe they just say whatever comes to mind to sate the press and then lay it out when they wrap it up. Or not. In short, who the fuck knows but the Turks?

The stories coming out of Bangkok are changing so rapidly LoS is gonna reserve judgment on this case. Instead we'll lay out the current strains of thought. The current newspaper consensus as of today seems to be auto-erotic asphyxiation. (We were shocked to read in one article that 500-100 people die this way each year in the US alone, which itself may or may not be a dubious "fact".) Earlier reports, later dismissed, suggested the actor's hands were bound together. This was amended to ropes around the neck and genitalia.

Update: Ex-wife Marina Anderson confirms in an interview with ABC the reports---originally presented on The Smoking Gun--that Carradine practiced "deviant sexual behavior which was potentially deadly." TMZ reports these words from another ex-wife, Gail Jensen: "He liked to be tied up. And he could tie himself up ... He spent days planning a different feature. He would go to a hardware store and buy the stuff."

Friends and family are adamantly ruling suicide out. He was to upbeat, not depressed. That doesn't mean of course he didn't simply fuck up or that his bondage ropes went awry as he passed out from lack of oxygen. Dangerous stuff, but not suicidal, necessarily. Foul play is the message they are sending.

And then, there's the photo published by Thai Rath. Are his hands in fact bound, or is that stuff around his wrists part of his gear, a safety net even, to take the pressure off his neck if he passed out? If they are in fact tied together, it would be hard not to draw the conclusion he was with another person. Which doesn't even mean foul play was involved. It wouldn't be the first S&M accident, surely. He wasn't young, he had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.

Update: TMZ again, quotes forensic scientist Brent Turvey as saying that tying onseself is not as impossible as it seems. "Turvey says it's simple for someone to tie rope around his/her hands, by loosely tying the hands in front -- then raising them up to tighten. Turvey says undoing the knot is easy as well, allowing for a quick escape."

But be prepared for the alchemical renderings. At 4:30 in the following video clip, CNN correspondent Jerry Penacol drops the "secret societies" bomb. The beast is out of the cage....

Edotorial decision-making in action

Daer LoS:

I have a matter to bring to your intention regarding an article in the Washington Post about the Iraqi shoe-thrower.

This article reads:

But the scene was largely jubilant, as women in black abayas ululated triumphantly, their high-pitched shrieks reverberating in the courthouse lobby.

But when I first read it it said something different. I searched for the missing phrase and preserved by Google, it read:

Iraqi Defends Shoe-Throwing Incident - washingtonpost.com19 Feb 2009 ... But the scene was largely jubilant, as women in black abayas ululated triumphantly, their tongue-flapping, high-pitched shrieks....
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/19/AR2009021900322.html?hpid=topnews - 8 hours ago - Similar pages -

Voila! The frame is adjusted, an offending phrase removed, more efficient than Winston Smith cutting and pasting, pneumatic tubes to incinerators and all that.

Please consider this post for you site.

Sincerely,

Mortimer Hawkins, Iowa

P.S.

If you'd like to learn to ululate, btw, there are some good tips at a forum on tribe.

Their banner rocks:

Looking for "tongue-flapping shrieks"?

Find "tongue-flapping shrieks" on Tribe.net

P.P.S.

Googling "ululation" in images does not lead to what you might expect.